Subject: IANTD

Date: Mon, 2 Aug 1999 13:11:57 +0200

From: A Diver

My wife and I recently qualified as open water SCUBA divers under the guidance of a xxx facility. We qualified in May 1998. Since then we have completed our advanced course, stress and rescue, first aid and have received our master diver accreditation from xxx. With Nitrox becoming more freely available to recreational divers in South Africa and Mozambique we completed a xxxx Nitrox course. We felt that the course was very basic and wanted to increase our knowledge on this subject.

We were accepted for an Advanced Nitrox course with an IANTD facility. We found the discipline and training required by this course to be vastly superior to any of the other programs we have been on. Although this course is still a recreational course it borders on technical diving. We are currently doing an IANTD Overhead Environment course and we have done five cave dives as part of our training. We enjoy the increased discipline and training required by these more technical courses and want to continue to educate ourselves as fully fledged technical divers. We have an interest in cave diving, U/W photography and wreck diving. We have now made 95 dives with 40% of our dives between 10 to 20 m and 40% of our dives between 30 to 40 m.

The cross-over from a recreational diver to a technical diver not only requires training but there is also a huge requirement for new equipment. To date we are still diving with single cylinders (12lt steel) fitted with a H-valve and two first stages. To complete our cave training we will have to acquire double cylinders, manifolds, harness, new BC's with a backup, etc.

Regards. A Diver